How to Combine RSS Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

If you're looking for a way to combine RSS feeds or to amass web conversations, try Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes can be used “to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web” at your whim. This tool can be used for entertainment and education—a rare combination these days. There are currently pipes for Popular Music, Twitter Monitors, Google Image Searches, etc; because Pipes takes already existing content on the web and pushes it together, streamlines it, and filters it according to the parameters you need.

What is the Benefit?

One of the biggest benefits is the monitoring ability that Pipes can create for your business. There are many platforms you can purchase that will streamline what your clients, supporters and competitors are saying about you online—but Pipes is a simple and free way to see the same conversations. There are a lot of pre-built pipes you can use to help you better understand the impact of monitoring social chatter—Fast Wonder Blog, for example, has an entire log of Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks.

Looking for a Real-World Example?

If you are using an RSS feed module on the HubSpot platform, you know that the blog feed module can only pull from one RSS feed at a time; but what if you have multiple blogs, different categories, resources and press releases that you want to pull through in to a single stream? You can do it with Yahoo Pipes.

How Do I Make One?

Create a Yahoo account (or use your Google one because they're playing nice)

Go to pipes.yahoo.com and "Create a Pipe"

From there, it's a drag and drop fiesta—pull in a "Fetch Feed" and add up to 10 different RSS feeds, add a filter to remove the duplicate titles and another filter to stream them by publish date

Save, publish and grab the new RSS feed

So that's it. Just create, save, publish and viola! You're ready to plug your new feed into your HubSpot module.

Some might call Yahoo Pipes a hidden gem in the sea of feed burners. It's definitely a nifty tool and makes RSS feed combinations pretty simple. What would you use it for on your site? Are you using it to monitor social media conversations? What do you think is the biggest benefit? Let us know!